Environmental monitoring campaign in Treviso (Italy) was carried out from 19th October to 14th November 2017, along the pilot area, the so-called ”West Road”, namely ”Viale della Repubblica”, by ARPAV, in charge of air quality and noise assessment, in collaboration with the Municipality of Treviso, taking care of traffic flows measurement.The main goal of the campaign was to frame the baseline environmental conditions against which the Integrated Modelling Tool (IMT) developed within the REMEDIO project will be soon put into operation. According to this objective, environmental data monitored in Treviso will be feeding IMT for validation and fine-tuning operational set up. IMT is a multi-purpose modelling suite specifically designed to evaluate the effectiveness of implemented “soft mobility actions” (i.e. the core of REMEDIO measures to be deployed in the high congested road under study).For further details about this activity please refer to the following sections.

Materials and methods

A mobile stations was deployed at the monitoring site (Viale della Repubblica 154) equipped with different air quality samplers and analysers for the evaluation of the following pollutants: NO/NO2/NOx, SO2, CO, O3, BTEX, PM10, PM2.5, heavy metals and PAH.A phonometer for the assessment of noise levels (Leq) was installed right beside the air quality monitoring station along with a couple of doppler radars placed by the kerbside for the classification and counting of traffic flows in both directions of the road.

Brief outline of main results

Traffic flows were comparable to the levels measured during a previous campaign held in approximately the same conditions during year 2015, by implying that the total amount of vehicles already reached the maximum load (transportation capacity) of the road with a remarkable extension of the peak congested hours during most part of the working day (from 8 am to 6 pm). Vehicles composition was dominated by cars where light and heavy duty vehicles accounted for just a limited amont of the total.Air pollutant combustion tracers (NO/NO2/NOx, SO2, CO, O3, BTEX), both recorded at high frequency (1 minute) and “usual” (1 hour) time-resolution neither showed a consistent and roboust correlation with traffic flows nor a strong difference in magnitude with the corresponding air ambient levels measured by nearby background monitoring station within the urban area of Treviso.This peculiar environmental feature may be interpreted as an effect of the prevalent meteorological conditions (low wind speed associated with stable capping inversions) in conjunction with the strong influence of background pollutant concentrations emitted by other relevant sources (among others, the domestic heating consistently relying on biomass burning).Further and ongoing activities, both in terms of statistical analysis and IMT modelling exercises, is expected to shed light on this interesting enviromental issue.